...a photoBook is an autonomous art form, comparable with a piece of sculpture, a play or a film. The photographs lose their own photographic character as things 'in themselves' and become parts, translated into printing ink, of a dramatic event called a book...
- Dutch photography critic Ralph Prins

zondag 25 november 2007

Evidence Larry Sultan Mike Mandel Photography

In 1977 photographers Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel sifted through thousands of photographs in the files of the Bechtel Corporation, the Beverly Hills Police Department, the Jet Propulsion Laboratories, the U.S. Department of the Interior, Stanford Research Institute and a hundred other corporations, American government agencies, and educational, medical and technical institutions. They were looking for photographs that were made and used as transparent documents and purely objective instruments--as evidence, in short. Selecting 50 of the best, they printed these images with the care you would expect to find in a high-quality art photography book, publishing them in a simple, limited-edition volume titled Evidence. The concept for the book was clear: select photographs intended to be used as objective evidence and show that it is never that simple. Now an undisputed classic in the photo world, considered a seminal harbinger of conceptual photography, Evidence is nearly impossible to find. This new edition is being published in recognition of the project's continued relevance, and will contain a facsimile copy of the original book plus a newly commissioned scholarly essay by Sandra Phillips of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Additionally, this edition will include a new spread of images and a group of black-and-white illustrations selected by the artists from an archive of photographs that were not included in the original book.

Exhibition re-examines this groundbreaking experiment in the history of photography.

TUCSON, ARIZONA (January 2004)- IN THE MID 1970s, two young California artists named Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel became intrigued by the esthetic potential often found in photographs originally made as records. Armed with only a letter from the National Endowment for the Arts, they began visiting assorted industry headquarters, police departments, municipal agencies, and testing facilities, requesting permission to rummage through their photographic files for compelling images.

In March 1977 the pair exhibited 79 of these pictures at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and simultaneously published a book, titled "Evidence", which became an instant classic. "Evidence" was (as the artists then put it) "a poetic exploration upon the restructuring of imagery"-pictures that once served a functional purpose in the world were stripped of their explanatory captions and institutional contexts, and presented as expressive artifacts. The results of their experiment were fascinating, puzzling and more than a little provocative. "As artist-curators, Sultan and Mandel assumed a complicated position within contemporary debates about the esthetics of the documentary photograph. It is a debate that continues today," observes Dr. Douglas R. Nickel, Director of the CCP.

That same year, 1977, the newly established Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona acquired the entire set and sent the project on an international tour. More than a quarter century later, the Center will restage the seminal installation, concurrent with Distributed Art Publisher's (DAP)'s reprinting of a new edition of the book Evidence. The Center's presentation is supplemented with other Sultan-Mandel projects and with documentation related to the conception and life of "Evidence" as an exhibition. Evidence Revisited offers an opportunity to re-examine this groundbreaking experiment in the history of photography, and to consider the increasing relevance of found photographs to the museum world of today.

ABOUT MIKE MANDEL AND LARRY SULTAN

Mike Mandel has been a practicing artist since receiving a Master of Fine Arts degree from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1974. He grew up in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles during a period of expansion and transformation of the landscape that included the appearance of billboards, strip malls, and miles of freeways. This experience is telling in his work, which questions the meaning of photographic imagery within popular culture and draws from snapshots, advertising, news photographs, and public and corporate archives. Mandel has translated much of this work into book form, self-publishing nine photo-based books since the early 1970s. For the past eleven years, Mandel has been using the computer for his work and is interested in how the ancient medium of mosaic tile can be informed by the language of the pixel for photo-based ceramic tile mosaic works.

Larry Sultan has been working as an artist in the San Francisco Bay Area for over twenty-five years. For his individual and collaborative work he has received many grants and awards including a Guggenheim fellowship, five NEA fellowships, the Engelhard Award, and an award from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, among others. His photographic project, Pictures from Home, was published by Harry Abrams and has been exhibited nationally at the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the San Jose Museum of Art, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Currently Sultan is a Professor of Art at California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. He is represented by the Stephen Wirtz Gallery in San Francisco and the Janet Borden Gallery in New York. Since 1990, Sultan's twenty-five year collaboration with artist Mike Mandel has turned to the creation of permanent artworks that are integrated into the architecture of buildings and address the communities in which they are situated. They have recently completed successful projects in California and New York.